Culbertson, Ely

Ely Culbertson, (born July 22, 1891, Ploeşti, Rom.—died Dec. 27, 1955, Brattleboro, Vt., U.S.), American authority on the card game known as Contract Bridge who later abandoned the game to work for world peace.

Culbertson was the son of an American oil explorer and lived as a boy in Russia. He was educated in Geneva and Paris. In his youth he was a revolutionary agent in the Russian Caucasus, Mexico, and Spain. When his father’s fortune was lost in the Russian Revolution, he immigrated to the United States, where he had earlier studied at Yale University. He had also been a newsboy, a construction worker, a union leader, and a gambler.

Culbertson early became expert at Contract Bridge, which replaced Auction Bridge in popularity. In 1929 he founded the magazine Bridge World and from the early 1930s played tournament Bridge (partnered by his wife, Josephine Murphy Dillon), lectured and published books on Bridge, and became a syndicated Bridge columnist. He also published books on his bidding system and on Canasta, a card game of the Rummy family.

In the late 1930s the threat of war led him to abandon Bridge and resume his political activities. He founded the World Federation, Inc., and in 1946 the Citizens Committee for United Nations Reform, which advocated world peace by means of an international policing organization. He wrote Total Peace (1943) and Must We Fight Russia? (1946). His autobiography, The Strange Lives of One Man, was published in 1940.